(AP) The planet Earth is going to conquer Mars — full time.
Three countries — the United States, China , and the United Arab Emirates — are sending robotic missions to the red planet in quick succession beginning this week, finding evidence of ancient microbial existence and testing the location for future astronauts.
On its part, the U.S. is dispatching a six-wheeled rover of the size of a vehicle called Perseverance to gather samples of rock that will be returned to Earth on study in around a decade.
Our name is more important now than ever, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said as planning went on in the wake of the coronavirus epidemic, which would reduce the number of launch visitors.
Until reaching Mars next February, each spacecraft will fly more than 300 million miles (483 million KM) This takes at least six to seven months for a satellite to travel past the orbit of Earth, to synchronize with the more distant orbit around the sun of Mars.
Scientists want to learn what Mars was like when it had rivers, lakes and oceans that might have allowed basic, tiny species to thrive before the planet evolved into today's dry, wintery desert environment.
It's a tall challenge to try to prove that life exists on another planet. It has a rather high standard of evidence, said Project scientist Perseverance, Caltech's Ken Farley in Pasadena , California.
The three nearly identical launches are no coincidence: the timing is determined by the opening of a one-month period where Mars and Earth are perfectly positioned on the same side of the sky, reducing flight time and fuel consumption. This kind of window only opens once every 26 months.
For a long time Mars had exerted a powerful hold on the imagination but proved to be the graveyard for numerous missions.
Spacecraft blew up, burnt up or sunk, with the number of deaths approaching 50 percent over the decades. China's last effort, in 2011, ended in failure, in partnership with Russia.
Only the U.S. has successfully laid a spacecraft on Mars, doing so eight times, beginning with the 1976 twin Vikings. There currently operate two NASA landers, InSight and Curiosity. Six other astronauts are observing the earth from orbit: three from the United States, two from Europe and one from India.
The United Arab Emirates and China are looking to become part of the prestigious community.
The UAE spacecraft, called Amal, Arabic for Hope, is an orbiter set to launch off Japan on Wednesday, local time, on what will be the first interplanetary mission for the Arab world. Built in collaboration with the University of Colorado Boulder, the spacecraft will arrive in Mars in the year the UAE marks the 50th anniversary of its establishment.
The UAE wanted to send an exceptionally clear message to the Arab community, said Omran Sharaf, project manager. The point here is that if in less than 50 years the UAE will hit Mars then you can do even more. ... The nice thing about space, that sets really high standards.
The celestial weather station, operated from Dubai, will aim for an extremely high Martian orbit of 13,670 miles by 27,340 miles (22,000 kilometers by 44,000 Km) to research the upper atmosphere and track climate change.
China will be up next, somewhere about July 23 with the launch of a rover and an orbiter; Chinese authorities aren't sharing anything. The mission is called Tianwen, or Heaven Queries.
Meanwhile NASA is aiming from Cape Canaveral for a launch on July 30th.
In an ancient river delta and lake known as Jezero Crater, perseverance is expected to touch down, not nearly as big as Lake Okeechobee in Florida. The much smaller Chinese rover would shoot for an simpler, flatter target.
To hit the earth, all spacecraft will have to dive into what has been nicknamed "seven minutes of terror"—the most complicated and riskiest aspect of placing astronauts on the planet—through Mars' hazy red sky.
Jezero Crater is full of boulders, walls, sand dunes and depressions, all of which could stop the task of Perseverance. Brand new equipment for guidance and parachute firing can help guide the craft away from hazards. Given the 10 minutes it takes radio transmissions to travel one way between the Earth and Mars, ground controllers will be helpless.
Jezero Crater, according to scientists who have selected it over 60 other alternative locations, is worth the risks.
Where there was water — and Jezero was clearly flush with it 3.5 billion years ago — life may have existed, but it was actually just a plain microbial life, possibly present in a slimy film at the crater 's bottom. But, in the soil beds, certain microbes could have left telltale traces.
If they occur, perseverance can search for rocks which contain these biological signatures.
It will dig into the most attractive rocks and store a half-kilogram (about 1 pound) of samples in hundreds of titanium tubes which another rover would eventually pick up.
To stop infection of the samples by Earth bacteria, the tubes are super-sterilized, assured germ-free by Adam Stelzner, chief engineer for the mission at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.
I'm staking my name on that, yes, he said.
When prowling the earth, both Perseverance and China's rover will peer below, using radar to find any potential underwater bodies of water. Also, Perseverance will unleash a 4-pound (1.8-kilogram) spindly helicopter that will be the first rotorcraft ever to fly to another world.
Perseverance 's cameras will film the rover's descent color footage, offering humanity's first look at a parachute opening at Mars, while microphones record the sounds.
In the thin Martian atmosphere the rover must also seek to obtain oxygen from the carbon dioxide. Astronauts on Mars might some day use extracted oxygen to breathe as well as to make rocket propellants.
By 2024 NASA wants to return astronauts to the moon and send them to Mars in the 2030s from there. To that end, the space agency is sending Perseverance samples of space suit material to see how they stand up to the harsh Martian environment.
The tab for Perseverance 's mission is close to $3 billion, including the flight and a minimum of two years of operations in Mars. The project cost the UAE $200 million, including launch operations but not mission operations. China did not disclose its expenses. Europe and Russia have abandoned plans this summer to send a life-seeking rover to Mars, after falling behind in testing and then being slapped by COVID-19.
NASA sees the task of perseverance as a relatively low-risk way to test some of the technologies needed to take humans to the red planet and safely get them home.
Kind of insane for me to call it low risk because it has a lot of hard work and it has billions of dollars in it, said Farley. But if anything went wrong relative to humans, you'll be very pleased to have tried it on half a kilogram of rock instead of astronauts.
Source: Associated Press by Marcia Dunn
